Daniel “Papita” Z.
(dannizhao.yelp.com)Full Name: Daniel ZhaoAge: 23Job: studentFavorite Review Quote: “This place is a gem! I found a very good selection of Barley tea here, and bought several boxes home. They are so good! I’ll take a picture of the store front after the 10" snow melts :)”Time Spent Yelping (per week): 7 hours

Daniel “Papita” Z. (dannizhao.yelp.com)
Full Name: Daniel...

Colleen “CUJO” M.
(colleencujod.yelp.com)Full Name: Colleen M. (prefers not to disclose her full name) Age: mid-30sJob: legalFavorite Review Quote: “Certain circumstances arose on the evening of May 4th that resulted in me stabbing myself in the face with a screw driver.”Time Spent Yelping (per week): Probably 10-15 hours between reading reviews, researching, writing reviews and participating in the talk forum

Colleen “CUJO” M. (colleencujod.yelp.com)
Full Name: Colleen M....

Louise “Lil’ Weezy” P.
(lilweezy.yelp.com)Full Name: Louise FarbsteinAge: 30Job: Executive Assistant, Northeastern Retail Lumber Association, RensselaerFavorite Review Quote: “Other reasons to stop in: the afternoon delight menu (the song was written here, cue Anchorman singalong), best bartenders in the city (Bob and Ben), and awesome monthly specials — can I just move in during lobster month??”Time Spent Yelping (per week): About 20 minutes per month. But aside from writing, I use Yelp almost every day to figure out where to eat/shop/get my hair cut/etc.

Louise “Lil’ Weezy” P. (lilweezy.yelp.com)
Full Name: Louise...

Otis “Mr. Whoever You Think You Are” M.
(otism.yelp.com)Full Name: Otis Maxwell Age: that’s for him to know and us not to find outJob: professional writer (not about food)Favorite Review Quote: “I will get my pizza from one of the several places in the vicinity that do not include bile as a condiment.”Time Spent Yelping (per week): Probably 3 hours … too much!

Otis “Mr. Whoever You Think You Are” M. (otism.yelp.com)
Full...

Alison “Call me Ali Instead” V.
(avdv.yelp.com)Full Name: Alison VanDerVolgen Age: 30 Job: Strategy Executive PartnerFavorite Review Quote: “I chose The Haystack. It advertises itself as a grilled steak with cheese. And that’s what it was. A steak (not sliced or anything) topped with cheese on a bun. It was pretty good, though the steak was a little tough which made it hard to eat in sandwich form.”Time Spent Yelping (per week): Average time is tough. I probably spend about an hour a week if you count looking at reviews and writing them.

Alison “Call me Ali Instead” V. (avdv.yelp.com)
Full Name:...

The theory goes that if you advertise with Yelp, the company will squash your bad reviews and bump your good ones to the top. Kayleigh Winslow, PR coordinator at Yelp, says this isn't the case. Read more about the "Yelp conspiracy" below.
(Colleen Ingerto)

The theory goes that if you advertise with Yelp, the company will...

36.2% of U.S. Yelp users are between the ages of 35-54. (Infographic by Colleen Ingerto)

36.2% of U.S. Yelp users are between the ages of 35-54....

39.3% of U.S. Yelp users have an income of $100K +. (Infographic by Colleen Ingerto)

39.3% of U.S. Yelp users have an income of $100K +. (Infographic by...

57.6% of U.S. Yelp users are college educated. (Infographic by Colleen Ingerto)

57.6% of U.S. Yelp users are college educated. (Infographic by...

270,000 - The number of directions generated to businesses every day through Yelp's mobile apps. (Infographic by Colleen Ingerto)

Begun in San Francisco in October 2004, Yelp has evolved into a powerful, international user-review monolith. It drives business to — and away from — restaurants, doctors' offices, plumbers, gas stations. Love it or hate it, Yelp is the go-to place for recommendations on everything in any city. Maybe you've even contributed something to Yelp yourself.

To commemorate Yelp's 10th birthday, we reached out to some of the Capital Region's top Yelpers. These are review-writers who've been contributing for years. They've written hundreds of reviews on everything from cemeteries to ethnic groceries to the best (and worst) places to get pho. Talking with these writers about their process was revealing: the Venn diagram of the amateur food writer and the professional reviewer has a bigger and bigger intersection; the best Yelpers write poetically about the food they love. They go back to a place several times to make sure they've given the business a fair shake. They try to be mindful of their influence on a business's success.

"I have a rule," says Colleen, from Latham, who's been reviewing on Yelp for about four years. "I have to try restaurants at least twice before I give them a review to make sure it's consistent." Colleen, who asked that for privacy we only use her first name, has written 430 reviews (as of press time) on realtors, restaurants and bars, gyms and fitness centers, veterinarians and pet hospitals, and a few funny ones too: "The Only City Garbage Can On The Eastside" of Troy, for instance, and "Ixodes scapularis — Deer Tick" ("If I could give deer ticks and Lyme Disease zero stars I would. Columbia, Greene, Dutchess, and Ulster Counties are the worst counties in New York State for Lyme Disease").

Another prolific Yelper, Otis Maxwell, has written over 400 reviews. He began Yelping in 2006, when he was living in San Francisco. He says he didn't start reviewing in earnest, however, until he moved to Saratoga Springs about five years ago.

"When I came here there were fewer reviews and they weren't written nearly as well as they were in San Francisco," he says. "They would just say 'great pizza' or 'hard to find parking' or people were trying to get even with the business by leaving a really nasty review that you could really tell was personally biased." So Maxwell began contributing and, in the process, met other Yelpers. "I've met several good friends just through Yelp," he says.

The Internet enables us all to be critics. We chime in on Facebook and Twitter, on messageboards and comments sections of regional daily newspapers (ahem). These forums empower us to voice our displeasure over a bad experience with a pharmacy, dry cleaner or breakfast place. The past 10 years have seen a cultural shift in the way we discover what's around us. Zagat and Consumer Reports are out. LivingSocial and Yelp are most people's guides for everything — it's virtual word-of-mouth. According to Yelp, more than 53 million reviews have been written on local businesses all over the world. And the site gets 120 million unique visitors a month, according to 2013 data.

But the relationship between Yelpers and business owners can be fraught. Once a review goes up, little can be done to get it down unless it violates Yelp's content guidelines, which are sometimes ambiguous. You can't write a review about your own business, and if you get busted slandering a rival business you'll probably get your review removed. You can't violate anyone's privacy (by posting personal information) and you have to play mostly nice: no bigotry or hate speech or threats or intimidation. (See sidebar on what makes a reviewer an Elite Yelper.)

Still, business owners such as Vic Christopher, an owner of Lucas Confectionary and Wine Bar in Troy, are agitated by Yelp nitpickery.

"Our reviews are excellent. The number of customers who come through here because they read good reviews on Yelp is exceptional," Christopher says. "It's helped our business, absolutely." But Lucas has garnered a few lower-star reviews. One customer complained that there was only one bathroom. Christopher reached out to the reviewer and explained the restaurant actually has three bathrooms, not one. "How was I supposed to know that?" the customer responded, and declined to revise his review.

That kind of misinformation can be frustrating for businesses, whose very livelihoods count on customer satisfaction. That's why Maxwell says he is very careful about criticizing local venues. "I take very seriously that a bad review hurts the business," he says. "These are real people who depend on the business for their livelihood. Don't do it unless it's true what you're saying."

Christopher believes if a community values the small businesses that make their towns interesting, then the community has an obligation to support them, regardless of a negative experience. He says he wishes his unhappy customers would address him directly, in person, so that he can deal with the problem, rather than reading about it later in a public forum.

It's a fair point, but one that probably can't stick. Customers have always been fussy. And everyone has a right to express dissatisfaction about a business they paid for service. The democratic process can be brutal, though a good number of the negative reviews tend to be sockpuppet reviews — nefarious characters (read: rival business owners) pretending to be customers. It's difficult to weed out the real from the fake. (Colleen even says a fake-review red flag is too much negativity.)

"Negative reviews usually come from competitors," she says. "The red herring for me is [when someone writes] 'If I could give this place zero stars I would,' or the people that preface reviews with "I was in NYC for years so I know what good ____ is.' These are things that set off alarm bells for me. I can kind of spot the fakes from a mile away."

Louise Farbstein, a Yelper with more than 500 reviews under her belt, says she really dislikes strongly negative write-ups. "Other than fake reviews that are obviously from the owner's friends, the reviews I don't like are scathing 1-star rants," she writes in an e-mail. "Rather than give constructive criticism, they ream out the owner for something silly like charging a corkage fee." She says it's not always obvious to her which reviews are fake, though. "[S]ometimes three or four five-star reviews in a row that are over-the-top positive and full of superlatives make me wonder if the owner asked friends to review his or her business," she says. "If the review doesn't have anything specific to say about what makes the business great, it might be fake. I've gotten one or two messages from users in the past accusing me of posting a fake review because I wrote so much praise for a restaurant. I've never even been approached by anyone to write a false review, so I guess it's hard to tell sometimes!"

Alison VanDerVolgen, who's written 759 reviews since joining in 2007, once considered quitting Yelp but thought better of it.

"There has been a lot of media about Yelp and similar sites and I've questioned continuing to write reviews a couple of times," she wrote in an email. "However, after traveling and driving across the country and relying so heavily on Yelp, I feel like it is worth my time to keep contributing. If I have a terrible experience (1-2 stars) at a place, I usually try to remedy the situation while I'm there and give them a chance to correct it. Also, I've found the people I've come in contact with on Yelp to generally be a great group of people. Those people who are taking their time to write reviews are generally passionate about trying new places or having new experiences and want to share those things with others who may not discover these places without that review."

Who Are the Yelp Elite?

Some Yelpers have little "Elite" symbols next to their names. That means that Yelper has engaged with the community in a significant way — liking people's reviews, writing prolifically themselves, friending and interacting with other Yelpers, and other signs of devotedYelp use.

"There's no set criteria [for an Elite Yelper]," says Kayleigh Winslow, PR coordinator at Yelp. "It's really something where you know it when you see it."

So who picks the Elites?

Community managers. And you'll find community managers in 120 cities throughout 26 different countries, according to Kristen Whisenand, PR manager at Yelp. Yelpers nominate each other (or themselves) and the community manager decides who qualifies. Then the Elites get to go to Yelp-organized events and parties with giveaways and drinks and food and all kinds of little perks.

That's great for big cities, but smaller Yelp communities — such as the Capital Region — have to appeal to a national "Elite council," says Winslow, which decides who, in the global community, qualifies as Elite. (And they make that decision once a year.)

Josh K., from Albany, has been Yelping since September 2010. He became Elite in 2013.

"I would like to think [I was elected Elite] because they (someone at Yelp HQ in San Fran) recognized me as someone who writes passionately about local Capital Region restaurants and can positively represent the smaller Albany market, where we lack a paid community manager," Josh says in an email.

Without a community manager and formal, official events to attend, Yelpers here turn to each other and organize their own events.

The Yelp Conspiracy

We asked Kayleigh Winslow, PR coordinator at Yelp, to address the conspiracy theories that circulate the Web and the world about advertising with Yelp, and how that may hurt (or help) a business's page.

The theory goes that if you advertise with Yelp, the company will squash your bad reviews and bump your good ones to the top. Winslow says this isn't the case.

"You can look at any advertiser's page and see they have negative reviews as well as positive, as much as anyone else," she says. "If that advertiser had an option to erase all those reviews, why wouldn't they?"

Yelp has an automatic algorithm — called "recommendation software" — to detect spammy or fake reviews. That program flags certain suspicious users and reviews. What makes a user or review suspicious? Hyperbolic or superlative language, for one ("the absolute worst restaurant on Earth"), particularly when a comment like that comes from what Yelpers refer to as "orange heads" — reviewers with very few reviews and no profile picture (which leaves them with an orange silhouette). That's a sign of foul Yelp play.

"What you see happening is a business owner decides they don't want to advertise. They figure why would they when they can just go write their own reviews? So then they go and write those reviews, which Yelp suppresses" because self-reviewing is against the rules (and often pretty transparent). So the business owner concludes that Yelp is punishing him or her for not advertising. The crime isn't not advertising, Winslow says; it's pretending to be someone you're not.

The recommendation software also serves to boost the reviews (good or bad) of frequent or Elite Yelpers. Those reviews are presumed most legitimate and useful, Winslow says.

"It's the same as if you walk down the street and you hear some person on the corner yelling, 'Hey! Go try this restaurant!' versus your friend, who's a foodie and loves great food, tells you to go try a restaurant," she says. "You'll trust your friend. Not that person on the sidewalk."